What is SIOR and why is it helpful to you?

SIOR (Social Impact Open Repository) is an open access repository to display, share and store the social impact of research results. Achieving impact is a growing demand from society to science and to scientists, but this information had not yet been systematically gathered and registered. SIOR is the first open access worldwide registry on social impact, a non-profit initiative to enhance scientific research with social impact.

By including their evidence of social impact in SIOR, researchers and research institutions make clear contributions to science, to societies and to their own work. There are many social impacts from research projects which are unknown by society, but will be clarified in this repository. Citizens, institutions and funding agencies will find in SIOR both a general overview and very concrete evidence of research having social impact. Within SIOR, researchers or research institutions describe the social impact of their scientific work and provide the evidence of this impact and the source (i.e. institutional report, publication, legislation, website, dataset, press release, etc.). Evidence of social impact is peer reviewed before online publication, assigning a social impact score in relation to this evidence (see the ‘Criteria’ section).

SIOR is open source, enabling integration with other open source registries, CRIS systems and persistent identifiers. For instance, by registering to SIOR with an ORCID id, researchers can already link their social impacts to their individual research profiles.

Beyond gathering impact information and allowing for data search, SIOR provides measurable parameters of social improvements generated by scientific projects. SIOR is therefore transforming the idea of scientific research, by promoting a necessary alternative to the stagnation of scientific results and enabling real social impact. The SIOR initiative was born in the framework of the IMPACT-EV project, funded by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission and coordinated by the research center CREA at the University of Barcelona. IMPACT-EV’s objective is to create indicators and a system to monitor and evaluate scientific, political and social impact of research in SSH. SIOR will contribute to enhance scientific research with social impact and increase the visibility of this research on a worldwide scale, while widening the concern about social impact across international scientific community.

What is Social Impact?

Social impact are the social improvements achieved as a consequence of implementing the results of a particular research project or study. Our societies have already defined societal challenges and goals (such as EU2020 targets, UN Sustainable Development Goals, etc.) and need research developments and innovations to address them. Through SIOR researchers can provide evidence of how their research has been useful to help meet these social targets, for instance, contributing to create employment, increase access to health, reduce carbon emissions or reduce poverty, in a particular locality or at a broader scale. Often social impacts are not immediate but gathered in a longer term. SIOR allows researchers to edit periodically their entries, adding new evidence of impacts related to the results of their research projects.

Get started! Share your social impact from research!

Become a reviewer

Join the SIOR reviewer programme today!

Criteria of Reviewers

Publication of JCR articles in any of the following scientific fields in the last 5 years:

(SCI) Natural Sciences and Mathematics

(ENG) Engineering/Technology and Computer Sciences

(LIFE) Life and Agriculture Sciences

(MED) Clinical Medicine ans Pharmacy

(SOC) Social Sciences

(AH) Arts and Humanities

Participation in projects related to one of the scientific fields included in SIOR:

as IP

as partner

Being in possession of a national / international award from the scientific community

Participation and presentation in international renowned conferences in the last 5 years

NON-ACADEMIC PROFILE. Fulfill any of the criteria:

Professional links with any of the scientific areas

Previous experience of 3 years in the field

Have received training in the field

Have participated and / or had some responsibility within any of the fields

Personal links with any of the scientific areas

To have been in direct contact with results of the research / clinical trial

To have directly received the improvement of the research / clinical trial

Become an ambassador

SIOR ambassador are people used to work with social impact initiatives and they aim to empower those who have reached social impact but do not have access to a suitable space to publish it. Furthermore, SIOR Ambassadors know the importance of performing research oriented to social impact, making social impact a way of living.

Join the SIOR ambassador programme today!

What’s involved?

Besides being at the vanguard of social impact research, SIOR ambassadors

Share information about SIOR with a wider community

Promote SIOR on social networks (@SIORepository)

Support researchers in highlighting their social impact projects

Explain others what are the benefits of doing research with social impact

Encourage researchers to upload projects to SIOR

Use SIOR Ambassador tag in their email signature and CV

What’s in it for you?

Great networking opportunities

An ambassador ‘toolkit’ containing dissemination material

Video support from the SIOR team

Updates on our progress and insight into our future plans

You’ll be listed as an ambassador on the project website

What do we do?

We identify research with social impact

There are many studies and research done but remaining unknown. We pretend to collect all under the same name, making SIOR a renowned repository where all research with social impact finds a space to be shared and evaluated.

We run after science with social impact

All scientific research has a purpose and reaches a conclusion eventually, but when it has an impact, it is twice as relevant. Research with social impact changes lives and provides solutions.

We pursue open and transparent research

Our society is based on all stakeholders’ actions. While researchers study how to improve citizens’ lives, these vote for politics who pretend developing laws that provide solutions to the entire society. Being able to base your decisions in accurate information, according evidences, give the opportunity to arrive to better results and to build an improved society.

We gather solutions to global concerns

Worldwide inequalities and difficulties have been assembled globally under the UN-SDG – a set of 17 goals to transform world overcoming these differences by 2030 – and at European level, under the EU2020 targets – 5 goals of how the European society should be in order to offer all its citizens a better quality of life. We search projects that have demonstrated their social impact in terms of their compliance with the official goals and also according criteria such as % of improvement, transferability and sustainability, that have proven their impact publishing it in scientific journals.